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"Euphony is the first law of language"?

Hi Peachey, there are invisible forces at work in any human language tending to modify it. Two of the most powerful forces are the rule of analogy and the' rule of euphony' which you have mentioned . When people are unsure how to make a variant of a word, they mostly use as a model any word which seems to them to be somewhat similar. With the dropping of the sound of final 'e' in many English words, people were at a loss to know how to form the correct inflection to suit the purpose.

In the absence of a clear rule of grammar, in every language people will tend to use the most regular form available. In English that led eventually to the classes of regular verbs and nouns, the regular possessive with s and the loss of grammatical genders. The rule of euphony causes people faced with a choice of pronunciations to choose the one that either 'sounds right' or is easiest to say. It might well be called a rule of fluency. The rule causes words to conform with a high frequency of ocurrence to an overall 'shape' or orthography.